Finding Joy In Climate Solutions

What if we get it right? That's today's big question, and my returning guest is Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist. She is a policy expert, a writer, and a teacher working to help create the best possible climate future. She co-founded and leads the Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank for the future of coastal cities, and is the Roux Distinguished Scholar at Bowdoin College.

Ayana authored the forthcoming book, What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures, co-edited the best selling climate anthology, All We Can Save, and co-created and co-hosted the Spotify slash Gimlet podcast, How to Save a Planet. Lastly, she co-authored the Blue New Deal, a roadmap for including the ocean, what an idea, into climate policy.

Ayana earned a B.A. in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard University and a [00:01:00] PhD. in Marine Biology from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She serves on the board of directors for Patagonia and Green Wave, and on the advisory board of the Environmental Voter Project. Above all, Ayana is in love with climate solutions.

This is a special one for me. Ayana was guest number seven or eight on the show a long time ago. She took a chance on us. Thanks to our wonderful friend Franklin Leonard for making that happen. And almost 200 episodes later, a pandemic later, a few degrees of warming later, a lot has changed.

But Ayana's passion for nature, her influence on U.S. and global policy and our one wonderful habitable planet has not. I am such a huge fan of hers, and I am so thankful she came back to spend time with us. If you have been trying to find your way into this whole thing, today just might be your day.

Welcome to Important, [00:02:00] Not Important. My name is Quinn Emmett and this is science for people who give a shit. In our weekly conversations I take a deep dive with an incredible human like Ayana who's working on the front lines of the future to build a radically better today and tomorrow for everyone. Our mission is to help you understand and unfuck the future to get it right and our goal is to help you answer that question: what can I do?

Quinn: Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson, welcome back to the show. It's been a very long time.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Good to be here. Yeah.

Quinn: You say that now, let's see how it goes. You've got a lot on your plate. We talked a little bit offline about your other book back here with all of your friends, and it's one of my favorites. What made you finally commit to another book? With another 30 friends?

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: I signed a two [00:03:00] book deal and this book, supposed to come out first.

Quinn: Oh, no shit.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: All We Can Save was supposed to be, like, the cute little side project and then it became a very big project and it became a national bestseller and Katherine Wilkinson my co-editor and I then launched a whole non profit to carry on the work of the book and so yeah, it also took me a while to figure out how to frame this second book.

I knew I wanted to do a book really focused on climate solutions, but I wasn't sure how to do that and not make it feel like a textbook. So it took a while to unlock that.

Quinn: It seems again, you keep writing books with all of your friends…

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: I don't have the answer to like how to save the planet. No, it's some like obnoxious dude who thinks he knows all the answers. We've got some of those books.

Quinn: Oh yeah. There's, [00:04:00] I get sent a lot of them.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: They email me, these people in my like info at email address. They're like, hi, I have the answer to climate change, but for some reason no one will listen to me. You should help popularize my idea and make it happen. And I'm like, hard pass, sir.

Quinn: Hard pass. Hard pass.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: I have the brilliant answer that no one else has ever thought of and like for some reason.

Quinn: It's so weird. It's so weird. The good news is I've got three kids who are old enough now that either they roll their eyes at whatever my answers are for anything or I just say, I don't know, to any of their stuff. So that's really helpful for climate work. But it does seem like it's all about community, right?

There's a lot of joy in the book. There's a mixtape in the book.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Mm hmm.

Quinn: And I don't know, given the headlines and the way the media works that most people would expect a book about joy. Even with the title. But, you talk a lot about how important it is to [00:05:00] nourish it in the book. Why? How did you get to that point? With everything that's happened in the past few years?

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: If we're all just miserable, like trudging around so I guess we should do climate solutions, then it's just not going to happen that fast, or we're not going to build a big enough team. Like you have to throw a good enough party that people want to come. And I feel like the environmental movement has sort of failed at that. Like it's never been appealing and aspirational to be a person for some reason that's like doing stuff to save all the species that live on this magnificent planet. It's like never been hip per se. Maybe in the seventies, maybe at the Back to the Land movement.

But yeah, we have to make climate solutions cool and I am absolutely not an arbiter of cool.

I'm wearing a gray cardigan, I think I'm just like putting all this out there, hoping that other people will take the bait and do the thing that makes it [00:06:00] cool.

That this will become a cultural conversation essentially, instead of a scientific or technical or policy conversation.

Quinn: You're not the arbiter of cool, but where do you get the most joy? Is it doing these conversations? Is it writing your books?

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: I mean I love a Venn diagram.

Quinn: She loves a Venn diagram. The TED Talks. They're everywhere.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Yeah. I think. Nature. I really am just madly in love with this planet and all these ecosystems. We get to live on the same planet as octopuses and fireflies and shooting stars. Can we just Freaking appreciate this a little bit? They're pretty dope.

Quinn: They're pretty amazing.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: So I guess I just feel really lucky and I want to keep living here on Earth.

I do not want to go to Mars. I want to be here. I want to fix things here. I want to be with the people that I love, be with the other creatures that I love and enjoy the sunset and [00:07:00] have clean air and clean water. And I'm willing to make that my life's work. And I think a lot more people are willing to do that every day and are finding ways to plug into solutions.

This whole Venn diagram of what are you good at? What needs doing and what brings you joy. And that joy piece, I think we'll get more of us to find our way to that center of the heart of that diagram, because, or keep us there longer, because otherwise you're just like, I don't know, let's go watch NASCAR or whatever it is that we're doing instead of, or formula E at the very least, I guess, like electric car.

Quinn: I hope that's what that E means. I was unsure.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: I think so. Yeah. And I think that's the opportunity Everything is needed to implement, to accelerate climate solutions. We need rom coms. We need finance. We need green buildings, right? We need transportation. We need farming. We need restoring and protecting ecosystems. [00:08:00] We need project managers and website builders and administrators and teachers and doctors and lawyers and everything.

We need party planners, please, for the love of God.

Quinn: Again, not my thing.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: So I think that's the opportunity whatever you have to bring to the table, you can use those skills, those resources, those networks in favor of climate solutions, that's the pitch I'm trying to make is like join this team because it is not currently the winning team, but it desperately needs to be.

Quinn: I love that. But for each of those people, it's got to start somewhere. And what I love, you have, your first line of the book is up there with “it was a dark and stormy night”. To say “it was my bad fate to fall in love with coral reefs just as they were dying” is so good.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: I have to admit to you who wrote that line.

This was an ex boyfriend like four [00:09:00] years ago when I was first thinking about writing the book who read that chapter and was like, I think what you're trying to say is, and I was like, yep, that's exactly what I'm trying to say. Thank you so much. So shout out to Forrest Lewis. I haven't talked to him in years. I'm not sure how he's doing. I hope he's doing well. He's a great carpenter.

Quinn: I love that, we need carpenters, right? We need carpenters who can handle little prose.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Absolutely. We need carpenters and plumbers and electricians and pipefitters and all of it.

Quinn: But I love because you just named all these different people. We need party planners, carpenters, the whole thing, but you're glass bottom boat journey, the first trip you said you took with your family that wasn't about seeing grandparents. That's what got you going. And I love, you spent so much of the book in conversation with these incredible people that I love talking about the past and the current and the future and kids. And one of the things I think about a [00:10:00] lot, and I try to work on is getting kids, especially kids who have been deprived of it, more access to nature. Because not, everybody has that or goes on the glass bottom boat or can go to a state park or whatever. How important is that if we're like, hey, we need to build this next generation of people who do all these things and how they apply to climate? How do they get that relationship if they're deprived of it? How do we do that better?

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: I think the good news is nature is very easy to love. My upbringing was mostly in Brooklyn, this tiny little backyard, playing in the dirt, digging for worms, digging up my dad's tulip bulbs and getting in trouble, but making mud pies. You don't need to go to the Rocky Mountains or the Great Barrier Reef to fall in love with nature. It could be ivy on a building. It could be a little dandelion growing out of a crack in the sidewalk, right? It could be a rainbow. It could be a sun shower, right? It could be, for me, it was one of the things I was obsessed with, like many kids, it's [00:11:00] autumn leaves. When the leaves change colors, my dad hated walking me to school in the fall because it would take forever because I was like, Ooh, that's a good one. Ooh, can we stop and pick up that leaf? And he was like, you already have eight leaves in your hand. Can we please just get you to preschool?

And so I think it doesn't have to be some majestic, far away from every other human kind of experience. We have nature around us everywhere. We just have to stop and notice it and appreciate it. And in fact, appreciate it more for its ability to thrive even in unlikely places.

Quinn: And in less temperate times than it's used to over the past couple hundred years.

I love that because your dad's you can't hold any more leaves, enough with the leaves, but you became this world famous marine biologist, right? And what I love about nature is you can be a generalist about it a little bit, right?

You can just take this love of I love dolphins [00:12:00] and whales. I just want to swim off with the dolphins and the whales. I don't know very much about them.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: I do not like dolphins.

Quinn: Why don't you like dolphins? Hold on. Wait, pause. Why don't dolphins?

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Just feel like they're obnoxious. I feel like they get all the attention. I'm like, this is not what we need to be worried about. Can someone be this concerned about mangroves, please? Or like parrot fish or sea urchins.

Like we've got some other stuff that deserves it. They're just bogarting all the affection and they're jerky.

Quinn: They’re very proud of themselves.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: And so I'm just not really into dolphins.

Quinn: Okay. That's fair. If you had to pick one though, one animal.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: They’re just cocky jerks.

Quinn: Yeah. Okay. Jerks feels like pushing it, but cocky. I'll give you that. I'll give you, they don't always have to jump, but they feel like they always have. They're like, yeah, we're here.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: I will admit it's a very unpopular opinion. Absolutely.

Quinn: Hey, you had [00:13:00] on another one of my favorite guests that we had on a hundred years ago. Leah Penniman from Soul Fire Farm, you had her in the book, and you guys talked about, there was this line, like halfway through your conversation, she said, and I think she was quoting a coworker, our job as farmers is to call the carbon and call the life back into the soil.

That's our number one duty as farmers, is to call the carbon home. And you said, I love that, because we've vilified carbon, but carbon's the building block of all life. It's just in the wrong place. And that just stuck with me so much because it matters, obviously, and so much as we're getting better about this, how we talk about things and people and ideas and taking a step back and going, Wait, Carbon's not the bad guy here.

It's just in the wrong place. What else can we do like that?

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Mostly carbon.

Quinn: Yeah.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: It's not, it's just an element. It's just that [00:14:00] big old C in the periodic table.

Quinn: Yeah. It's like language and ideas and going hold on, this is not the thing. That's the thing in the headlines, but it's not the thing we're just putting in the wrong place. Where else is that applicable?

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: We're definitely putting our money in the wrong place.

This is a big part of my conversation in the book with Bill McKibben, right? If you, for example, have, $125,000 saved up for your retirement, which a lot of people do as they're approaching retirement age. Where is that money?

There's analysis that shows that amount of money, if it's in just like a regular 401k or bank it could be doing more harm to the planet than all the good, it would cancel out all the good you could ever do in terms of eating only plants and only walking or biking or never using another piece of plastic, right?

Because that money in the bank. Some portion of it is invested in expanding fossil fuel infrastructure. [00:15:00] If your money is in JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, I always forget there's four and I always only get three. It is part of the problem. Those banks are the biggest financiers of fossil fuel companies.

It's not just keeping the lights on until we switch to renewables, it’s actually expanding the capacity for drilling and fracking and all that stuff that we just need to stop and just invest in expanding renewable energy, for example. So I, as far as like things in the wrong place, our dollars are not matching up with the investments that would be needed, the trillions of dollars level of investments that are needed to implement all these climate solutions. And that's something, a very big and fairly easy thing a lot of us can do is just make sure however much money we have, it's in a place that's not making things worse.

Quinn: I love that because it's true. It's a [00:16:00] tool, right? And obviously there's a lot of shades of capitalism that make it not great and got us here. Made the Industrial Revolution here happen, but obviously there's been some trade offs with that.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: We could have had the Industrial Revolution and then when science kicked in with hey, climate change is coming. We should maybe do something, in like the eighties, it would be great if we had started this process 45 years ago. And then honestly, like we'd probably be fine if we just listened to the scientists when they started warning us.

Quinn: And people could still make a lot of money.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Yeah, the industrial revolution was a dangerous path, but of course, yeah. There is so much money to be made in climate solutions.

Quinn: There's an investor, Chris Sacca, I think his name is. He runs a fund called Lower Carbon. He made a bunch of money on Uber and shit like that. And his whole thing, he invests in, I think there's some carbon removal, but it's a lot of hard climate tech.

And his thing to all the other investor friends is you guys are morons like this is the biggest opportunity that's [00:17:00] ever existed. He's like yes, I want to fix all these things, but also like I'm gonna make so much money when these things work. It's like we have to replace every automobile on the planet, that's, you're gonna make some money.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Also, if all of us have our own individual electric vehicles, that's not the answer. We need better public transit. We need high speed rail. We need bike lanes, right? We need more walkable cities. I have an EV. I like it. It's very cool. But I just think we really need to stop relying on that as like the answer for transportation, which is how so much of the messaging is going.

And there's an interview in the book with Kendra Pierre Lewis, who's a climate journalist, who's currently at Bloomberg. And she says, for example, we need to shift the way we do climate reporting so that instead of an automobile section, we have a transportation section so that we're talking about this more broadly and think about how we shift the literal framing of [00:18:00] presenting information in order to get people to think about these things differently.

Quinn: Can we talk about your family for a minute? We've had people on the show, we had this gentleman from Iran, whose dad had a specific form of muscle dystrophy when he was very small. When the gentleman I interviewed was very small. And this guy grew up, became a scientist, and basically found the cure for it. It was too late for his dad. But it was this direct, oh, I'm gonna, I have to do this thing. You grew up loving the leaves and on the glass bottom boat. And your dad is an architect, and your mom goes into homesteading, and all these things, again, trying to help people find their way into these things, the point is, it can be this very direct link, like this gentleman, Sharif, or it could be like yours, where all these things come together, where you're just like, I just fucking love nature, and yes, I specifically write about the Blue New Deal, but when did you really take a step back and realize the different [00:19:00] ways, where now you can have conversations about the built environment, because you grew up with an architect and you understand homesteading more because you camp out on your mom's farm and things like that. How can people take a step back and gather together these pieces of themselves to more understand what actually influences them and where they might discover more of what they're into.

Does that make sense?

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Yeah, I think, part of writing this book, actually, was feeling very lucky about my upbringing. I was exposed to so many different academic disciplines, cultural phenomena. I grew up in Fort Greene, Brooklyn in the eighties, when it was mostly jazz, like so many jazz musicians lived there because it was like super cheap. Fort Green was the hood, let's be clear in the eighties, it’s now like the most expensive exclusive neighborhood in Brooklyn, and all of New York City. Brownstones were like $40,000 then, and they are now like start at [00:20:00] 4 million in the course of my lifetime. But then it was just like a working class neighborhood and a lot of jazz musicians lived there.

And I grew up surrounded by jazz musicians. I grew up with my dad loving jazz music and having 2000 jazz records in our living room and taking jazz lessons from the Grammy nominated singer around the corner. And singing for my supper and jazz clubs. My parents, was like a joke. They were going to feed me anyway, but they would make me sing with our family friends.

And that's actually part of the reason I'm comfortable on a microphone. Which has nothing to do with climate change, but it has everything to do with what I can bring to the table in this moment in human history. So I have this PhD in marine biology. How do I connect that to what needs doing?

I have this affinity for Brooklyn and coastal cities. How can I think about what needs to happen there? So this is how my own climate action Venn diagram came to be, right, my [00:21:00] what are you good at this marine biology, communications, policy stuff, mixed with oh shit, coastal cities are actually really big trouble.

We do not have a plan for dealing with climate change, sea level rise, etc. Infrastructure. Justly sourced offshore renewable energy protecting and restoring ecosystems in urban contexts, like there's so much work to do there. And then the joy part is I love design, I love changing the rules of the game, like I love a policy win, right and I love collaborative dorky behind the scenes work as much as people may see me out there waving my hands around, obviously talking about all this stuff.

My happy place is writing policy memos and being deep in the spreadsheets. And so I co-founded Urban Ocean Lab, this policy think tank for the future of coastal cities, because that's the sweet spot for me of what I'm good at and what needs doing and what brings me [00:22:00] joy. And I think, of course, that will be different for everyone.

But it's, I think it's a really useful exercise to inventory what is it that you can bring to the table? What is your specific, unique skills, resources, networks, mashup that each person has to offer. So if you want a worksheet on this, there is one on the website for the book at getitright.earth.

We've got your Venn diagram worksheet PDF downloadable. We're hoping that people, it features in the introduction and conclusion of the book, as well, so that people can actually bust out the colored pencils and start to sketch it out. Cause it's a, for many people, be a new way of thinking about how they should be showing up in this moment.

Quinn: Where do you think people forget to look?

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: I think it's like, there's a lot of things we don't, in this current iteration of society really value. Like I was [00:23:00] joking before about party planning. If you're a party planner, you can absolutely deploy that skill in favor of climate action. If you are a person who like is a tastemaker, we absolutely need you to influence the shit out of everybody to work on climate solutions, to abandon rabid consumerism, to rethink culture. So I think we dismiss these soft skills as they might be called, but we absolutely need that stuff. We need project managers. We need designers, right? We need to make all of this look good. One of the, what if questions I pose in the book is what if climate solutions were beautiful?

That's an option for us. Can we just go make a beautiful future? And of course there will be extreme weather. There will still be hurricanes and droughts and floods and wildfires and huge number of people who need to migrate and all sorts of food shortages [00:24:00] and all this stuff that's already here and coming, but we have a lot of say, collectively, humanity, in how we respond to those risks and changes and how we, yeah, how we adapt to those realities and how we prevent things from getting worse. And just how we literally design the future. One of the facts in the book that really blew my mind personally, when I read it is in the if we build it section. Love a movie reference no one under 40 will get, about 75 percent of the infrastructure that will be in place in 2050 has yet to be built.

Quinn: That's crazy. That's not half. That's 75%.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Most.

Quinn: Holy shit.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Yeah, like what if we just built some really good stuff that was cool and interesting and durable and could be deconstructed instead of needing to be demolished so we could reuse all the pieces like Legos. Like we just, [00:25:00] there's so much possibility there, right? And so as much as there are problems, I don't want to be like corny about it, but there are right next to all those problems, there are possibilities.

And that's actually how I laid out the sections of the book.

Quinn: By the way, I wanted to talk about that. It seems, it's a funny thing, right?

Because gatekeeping, all this stuff, everybody who's been frustrated trying to make progress for so long. Facts aren't going to cut it, stories will, this and that. It's all true. You made this pointed effort to have, I think it was ten problems and ten possibilities in each of these sections, right? Can't just have one of those, obviously, right?

We can't just have dream of the beautiful future without acknowledge what we're dealing with but you also can't just be like here's how we're fucked. You have to actually pose a response to that, right? Where did you struggle with that or did they all come easy to you or did you ever you know, what did they say, write yourself into a corner where you're like? Oh, I'm gonna do the 10 problems and 10 opportunities for fashion and then you're like Jesus. I don't know.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: [00:26:00] Yeah, I didn't do fashion. There's a few in there on fashion, but I was actually thinking, so I launched a Substack newsletter last week in part because I wanted to carry on these conversations. And one of the interview topics that I didn't, isn't included in the book is fashion. So subscribe or whatever, if you want to see more interviews, I'm going to be launching a podcast within Substack.

But to just zoom out a bit for people who haven't had the advanced copy of the book, it's structured in eight sections. It starts with Possibility and it ends with Transformation. And there's these six sections in the middle, Replenish and Rre-green, that has that Leah Penniman interview in it.

If We Build It, which has these sort of architecture, AI design conversations, Follow the Money. It's obvious. Culture is the Context with folks from Hollywood, news, youth climate movement, Changing the Rules, which is about policy, Community Foremost and then [00:27:00] Transformation. And so in each of those middle six sections, there's this list of 10 problems and 10 possibilities.

So each of those sections opens with a quote, for example, follow the money opens with Lauryn Hill. It's funny how money changes situation. I was not allowed to use the next lines. I wanted the whole verse, but could not get the copyright permissions for that. And then it has a list of what if questions because I feel like sometimes questions are just as powerful as answers, what if we reimagine capitalism regeneratively? What if corporations consider earth as a shareholder, et cetera. And then there's these sets of 10 problems and 10 possibilities, and they don't always match up one to one.

I did it that way actually for a very practical, personal reason as a list.

Who doesn't love a top 10 list? But also because I personally cannot digest statistics in paragraph form. If it's a paragraph where you're like [00:28:00] trying to like smoothly write between all these facts I'm just like, it's just all becomes a jumble to me, but I could do some bullet points.

I could get my head around that. So these are like 10 minuses and 10 pluses as bullet points. But also, sneakily, I was supposed to write an introduction to each section of the book and I didn't want to do it. Because it seemed really boring. And so I was like, what if I just wrote a list of what if questions that sort of frame all the big topics in this section and then just put a list of problems and possibilities that are basically going to be elaborated upon.

And then I don't need to write an intro because who wants to read an like more introductory material,

And all these, if folks are curious, are on the book's website, all the problems and possibilities with hyperlinks to all the sources, if you want to go deep and get nerdy that's all at get it right dot earth.

Quinn: There's two quotes in the book I just want to talk about briefly before I let you go to your five other conversations here. They complement each other. And, pop culture and history is filled with versions of [00:29:00] these that everybody throws around on Twitter and such. But Grace Lee Boggs said, The time has come for us to reimagine everything. To become the new kind of people that are needed at such a huge period of transition. And she said, We must transform ourselves to transform our world. And you said, There is a soft power in how you spend your time and money, how you look out for each other, and how you roll up your sleeves and make change. They feel like they really fit to me because where Grace and, her wonderful husband, they were activists for 40, 50 years together and, That was a while ago, she passed away in 2000, something like that, right? And we're still on this precipice or another one. And so she talks in very grand terms about you've got to be Gandalf or whatever it is at the turn of the tide. You've got to stand up and do this. And I feel like what you're saying is like the empathetic [00:30:00] version of that, which is everyone's going to have a very different way of coming into this thing.

And you do hold a lot of power in how you reflect on yourself and how you decide to use not just, I'm an accountant, but your time, like we don't, we can't make more time. You can make more money some of us. But how you roll up your sleeves and get to it, you know, don't be, at least to me, it feels don't be I guess, don't belittle what you can contribute. Is that barking up the right tree?

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I, as you say that, I'm thinking about, just guidance from my mother that was just like live by example, be an example, right? That's fundamentally, that's the best thing we can do. People know if you're just like talking a bunch of shit and not really living your values, your purported values, but watching my mother teach in inner city schools, English, high school English for 37 years. Watching her leave that and, and she started the environmental club and she [00:31:00] helped kids get into college and just took care of people in this beautiful way. Rewrote the English curriculum to have writers of color so that the students would see themselves reflected in what they were reading and maybe be more enticed to love literature in a different way, right?

She bought all her own books like we crazily make teachers do in the U.S. and completely underfunded school systems, right? She was buying all of it, she had a shopping cart full of books that she would wheel to school every term and give them out and had her name written on the spine of everyone and got most of them back every term, right? And I think, seeing the way that she devoted herself to teaching and seeing the way she devoted herself then on a dime to becoming a, you know, regenerative permaculture homestead farmer, upstate New York for 20 years raising chickens and vegetables and planting fruit trees and trying to show [00:32:00] this other way to live, trying to repair and restore the soil, make a home for the bees and the butterflies and all the bugs was just such a beautiful transformation of boring house with a bunch of lawn.

Quinn: Yeah.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: And to see that unfold before your eyes is really remarkable. And she had no qualifications, except for tenacity, determination, and a real willingness to embrace trial and error as a process. And often the stakes for trial and error are pretty low, like we could just try stuff.

And if it doesn't work, if it's not the right fit for you, then you just don't keep doing it, right?

Especially if it's a hobby, especially if it's a way you're doing something with your neighbors, in your community, in your business, right? We're all trying stuff all the time. We just need to think about climate and think more creatively as we're going through that process. Yeah, I think [00:33:00] a lot about how much softness there can be in all this.

It's not just engineering and physics. It really is, like, how do we want to be humans together on this extremely fucking cool planet?

Yeah, this is it! The slogan, there is no planet B, it sounds so corny, but it's true. This is the one planet that can sustain human life.

Quinn: It's funny. Thank you for sharing all that. That was extremely eloquent and it's very thoughtful because it really is, it's so easy to celebrate something magnificent and imperfect like the IRA or some local policy about adaptation, whatever it might be. But it's really the little shit. It's the showing up every day, whatever the thing is that you've got stuck in your crawl that you can do that does add up, right? And hopefully attracts other people to join you or do their version of it. And like you said, you don't have to have some, [00:34:00] you don't have to be someone who's skilled in the chemicals of soil to go be a regenerative farmer.

Like you said, you could just try it.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Get some seeds and see what happens.

Quinn: Get some seeds and see what happens.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: This is what I said with Leah, is just act as if, bring the seeds. Who knows?

Quinn: Who knows? I love that. Ayana, what are the specific ways, besides your Substack, your book, your other book that people can support your work?

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: All We Can Save: Truth, courage, and solutions for the climate crisis.

Quinn: iAnd again, this is what happens with fucking side projects, is it turned into a whole thing. It's, yeah, it never stops. What other ways would you suggest people get involved either again directly you know supporting your policy think tank or just locally. On your mind?

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Yeah. If any of you, anyone listening wants to fund climate ocean policy solutions for coastal cities. Holler at your girl. But also just check it [00:35:00] out. There's, we built a whole resource hub, open access resource hub.

Quinn: Oh, wait. Yes. That was incredible

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: It has example legislation and scientific papers and policy and data sets and all this stuff, because we're all reinventing the wheel.

And we just do not have time for that. So the opportunity is to say okay, who's doing what that's working and how can we repeat each other's successes and avoids mishaps? And yeah, that's been a dream of mine for five years. And so it was really great to launch that. So urbanoceanlab.org, you can find our resource hub there. And I think the thing that people can do to support me is do your climate Venn diagram and then get to work and bring as many people with you as you can. I don't personally need the support. I'm very much looking forward to the end of the book tour and disappearing into the forest.

But I think the reason that I did all this stuff as someone who is becoming more and more introverted every [00:36:00] day is because I wanted to do my part to welcome other people in. Everyone is going to need a welcome from a different person. But to the extent that people will hear my version of come.

We need you. There is a place for you in this work. Then I thought, I would try putting that out there in my particular like 90s kid from Brooklyn sort of mixtape poetry, rap lyrics, Afrofuturist collage sort of way. And hopefully it will, you know, land well for some number of people who then run with it and do whatever needs doing.

Quinn: I love it. Clearly you have, again, lived that with your work, trying to share policy that works, write policy that can work for more than one place, writing and editing two books where you quite literally bring along a whole host of your friends. You are [00:37:00] the Greek connector in all of this using your connections.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: I think it's important to say that it's impossible to answer. What if we get it right as one person? And the reason there's interviews in this book is because I thought that would be better than just paraphrasing all these smart people. Just let you hear from them directly and have it be just like the reason that you do this in podcast form.

We can just absorb information differently when we're in dialogue, in conversation with each other, and that sort of, you mentioned the beginning of this conversation, the lightheartedness, the joy that comes through in this book. That's because these are my friends. Like I actually like these people. They have inspired me.

They have shown me the way forward. When I think about answers to the what if we get it right question, I think of their work, I think of their visions of climate futures. And so I think of myself much more as a curator these days and that is such a fun role to get to play.

Quinn: I love it. No one does it better or at a more crucial juncture in [00:38:00] history.

Hopefully we can stop saying that at some point and just go enjoy something we've gotten right and the stakes can be lowered a little bit. Jesus.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Oh my god. I just want to write bad poetry on the beach or something,

Quinn: Right? Just fluff. I'm so thankful for your time and everything you've done.

The book is beautiful. Again, if you haven't gotten All We Can Save, check that one out as well. And there's all kinds of tools on that site. Katherine's an incredible human. Yeah, thank you for sharing all this and these stories and these conversations and so much of yourself. We really appreciate it.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Thanks for having me.